Page 29 of Hero

“Checking sounds like a good idea,” she said. “If it is stupid, do you leave town or wear a disguise for a week?”

“If I can, I correct it. If I can’t, I kill it.”

And then the news came on. There was the anchor couple—a woman, Darla Stevens, and her partner, Sean Kepler. “Demonstrations today at City Hall and at the home of the young woman who shot the two alleged home invasion robbers, right after this.” Joe Alston waited through a couple of commercials, but saw that Justine was beginning to get agitated. He stood up, said, “Excuse me,” and walked to the bathroom before the report began.

He urinated, washed his hands, combed his hair, turned on his electric toothbrush and brushed his teeth, then decided he had killed all the time he could there, came out and went into his bedroom to straighten the bedspread, and listened to the voices. He wondered if the report would scare her off, but he had felt it was necessary to be sure she knew what had been going on. He went back out and saw that she was still there, transfixed. For the first time she seemed unaware of him.

He waited for a few more seconds and then said, “It’s obviously been a slow news day. Unless you’re interested in this local stuff, I can find a movie.”

She managed a smile. “Good idea.”

He switched the television set from cable to streaming, found the category “Romantic Comedies,” and framed one that had a picture of two actors whose faces were familiar. “Have you seen this one?”

She said, “I don’t think so, but have you ever seen one where they didn’t hate each other but end up together anyway? I don’t see anything better, though. We may as well try it.”

He clicked the remote control on it. He had anticipated that Justine Poole might not necessarily be a fan of romantic comedies, but it was likely that the woman she was playing—Anna—would be. He had donethe fair and responsible thing, and let Justine Poole see the report of what was happening in her case without revealing that he knew anything. Whatever she did next was up to her.

What she did was watch almost all of the movie and then pretend to fall asleep and listen to the happy ending, which was actually more realistic and sophisticated than usual, and therefore not entirely unpleasant. He gently shook her as though to wake her up. “Come on,” he said. “You know where the bedroom is. Go there and sleep.”

“What about you?”

“The main house has seven bedroom suites. I’ll be over there.”

She stood up. “Wow. I’m sorry to be such a bore. That movie hypnotized me. Were they still together at the end?”

“More like together again at last,” he said. “I guess the studio probably tested it both ways and the audience didn’t like the one where she turns on him, stabs him to death, and eats his liver.”

“The wisdom of crowds,” she said. “Are you sure you want to sleep in the main house? I can easily sleep out here on the couch.”

“No. It’s really not a problem. Good night.” He picked his keys up from the desk and locked the front door, then went out the side door and locked that behind him.

Justine stood there for a few seconds, moved closer to the big window, and watched him walk to the big house and disappear inside. A few seconds later she saw the light go on over what was probably the staircase. After a few more seconds she saw a light go on in an upper window.

She went into Joe’s bedroom and undressed, then lay down. The bed had been made this morning, but the sheets had not been changed. She didn’t care. She had what she’d needed so badly, a place to stay hidden for a whole night and give the killer a chance to makemistakes and get caught by the police. She hoped the rest and good food would also make her stronger and more clearheaded, but the main thing was being alive.

As she drifted toward the emptiness of sleep, she realized she was smelling Joe’s scent, his skin, and she caught herself being drawn into thinking about him. What if circumstances had been different? She had studied him for most of a long day. He was a smart, decent man who had at first decided to be helpful to her without feeling entitled to anything, in spite of the fact that she’d been lying to him. After he had noticed she was delaying her departure, sometime before noon, he had not acted worse. Now she regretted having taken the naked swim in the pool. She had done it partly as a way of manipulating him into being less indifferent, and partly just to get back at him for snubbing her, pretending she hadn’t noticed the sneaky keyhole cameras in the yard and making him see who he had just rejected.

What if things had been different, and she hadn’t been in fear for her life when they’d met? Would she be here, sleeping in his bed alone? She brushed away the thought. If she hadn’t been desperate and running, they never would have met, because she would never have approached him.

She felt anxiety about the people who had been picketing her condo building. She had been concentrating on the man who had been hired to kill her. It had not been wasted effort, because studying his picture and recognizing him a couple of times had kept her alive, but the news report about the demonstration had given her ideas that might help her find out who had ordered Ben’s killing and hers. The two lawyers had been pretty effective, so they were probably expensive. Who was paying them to defend the robbers who were in jail? Had anybody begun the process of bailing them out? Where had the Mercedes the robbers hadbeen driving come from? Was it stolen? If so, who had stolen it from whom, and how had it gotten to these young robbers?

She felt sorry for the families of the two men she had shot. To have a child who was pulling armed robberies was terrible. To have him killed at it was pure horror. She felt something worse than regret that the attempted robbery had ever happened. They had lost their boys—babies they had borne and loved and raised, and she had lost everything—Ben Spengler, her job, and more—her place in the world. She had the realization that she had never fully understood what she had been doing all this time. If a person’s profession was to carry a gun to protect people from violence, how could something like this not happen sometime?

She had spent the night of the shooting in the police station answering questions. The first night after that she had slept in Ben Spengler’s office while Ben had been murdered. The second night was in the hotel by the airport, and that made this one, borrowing a stranger’s bed, the third. And then she realized that she had lost her train of thought some time ago and was too exhausted to sort through the threads again. She slept.

Joe Alston slid the false wall panel to the side and unlocked the door to James Peter Turpin’s combination office and panic room in the architectural center of the big house. The hidden room had no windows, of course, and even the entry panel was off a large, sparsely furnished second-floor common room that could be fully surveyed by an intruder from the doorway on the upstairs landing and dismissed. It seemed designed to accommodate groups, possibly cocktail parties or evendancing. The last owner of the house had been a music executive who had needed a safe place because he had tax, drug, and hatred problems, so this innovation had probably been his.

Joe went inside the office, closed the door, and turned on the large surveillance monitor with the remote control on the desk. He looked at each of the twenty sections for a few seconds and satisfied himself that nobody was lurking on the property at the moment, then ran the recording in reverse until the time was threeP.M.and restarted it.

He ran the recording in fast forward until he saw movement, then ran it at normal speed. There she was, coming out of his guesthouse carrying his bath towel. She stopped on the pool deck, looked around her in every direction, looked back a second time at a few things he could not see on the screen, and then stepped out of her clothes and walked down the steps into the pool until she was completely immersed. She came up, the water streaming from her hair, and began to swim.

She was a strong, graceful swimmer with a good, correct freestyle stroke. When she reached the end of the pool she completed a quick flip turn, pushed off the wall, and remained submerged while she swam breaststroke back to the wall beside the steps and pushed off to swim backstroke for a length. She swam easily and unhurriedly for about twenty minutes, smoothed her hair with her fingers, then sat on the steps for a few minutes. She ducked herself under again for a few seconds and then stood, went up the steps, and lay on the nearest chaise longue while the sun dried her skin.

She was very pretty—beautiful was the only appropriate word in spite of how liberally people bestowed it—much more attractive than he had allowed himself to admit, because it had seemed to him to be a distraction, and therefore a probable source of manipulation andclouded judgments. He had already taken a much more leisurely view of her swimming session than would have been necessary to identify what had been going on. He ran the file back to the moment before she had stepped out of the house, erased all of it up to the present, and then turned to the security camera focused on the desk and said, “Hi, James. I just came in to see if there had been a prowler poking around in the yard while I was gone today, and I accidentally erased part of this afternoon’s security recording. It was all birds and squirrels, so if you see this, don’t worry.” He shut off the monitor, turned off the light, and stepped out. He relocked the door, slid the panel over it, walked down the hall toward the guest rooms, and thought about Justine.

She had been overconfident, probably because security was part of her profession. She might have assumed she would see any security cameras, which would have normally been mounted along the eaves of the house. She hadn’t known about the previous owner before James, who’d had twelve keyhole cameras mounted in places like false drainpipes and circuit boxes and even woven into a coaxial cable on the guesthouse.

Joe stopped at the door to the first guest room. He remembered that James had told him once that when he’d moved in, the old owner had left some of his belongings in addition to the fixtures and wiring. James had not said what they had been, but now Joe wondered if at least one of them might have been a gun. Maybe he should go back inside the office and open the safe to see. James had shown him where the combination was hidden, but he had never had any reason to use it.

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